German Tor Network Just Fine, Tor Director Says

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German Tor Network Just Fine, Tor Director Says

While German police have seized several Tor servers, Tor executive director Shava Nerad says that Tor itself is not under attack, that the police haven't charged any Tor server operators and the organization expects the servers will be returned without incident.

We are simply part of a very wide net that they cast trying to track someone doing something illegal. It's not much different from what would have happened if the police were investigating someone who had made obscene phone calls where the police would have seized the logs of the phone company.

The police won't find any useful information in the servers, since none of the volunteer operators enable logging on the Tor servers, according to Nerad.

"In fact, that scenario of them checking for logs is worst case," Nerad said. "Likely, they just seized every machine with an IP which had touched someone doing something nefarious. They probably have noidea that these were even Tor servers."

"I don't believe German police have a deep understanding of how an anonymizing system works and none of these routers have logs," Nerad said.

She fully expects that the servers will be returned, though the question is when.

"The mill of jurisprudence turns slowly, but exceedingly fine," Nerad said. "What happens is that this will all blow over, and they get their servers back."

Europeans value privacy and anonymity more than the United States, and there's no political moves in Europe to criminalize anonymity, according to Nerad.

Nerad learned of the seizures Thursday night, but the organization didn't send out a press release because they didn't consider it to be an attack on Tor.